The New Murrey and Blue blog

Online History groups are frequently visited by new members who excitedly tell tales of their illustrious ancestral history–Eleanor of Aquitaine is their x 20 gran, Richard III is a direct forebear along with Anne Boleyn, they have mysterious Dark Age chieftains, Roman generals like Magnus Maximus…even King Arthur has popped up from time to time. This subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle bragging often elicits groans of frustration from those there to discuss history, and sometimes some pretty fierce ribbing goes on.

Now doing genealogy may be fun and rewarding…but here’s a tip. You need those online trees verified by a proper genealogist, as inexperienced people often just add in what they believe, or hope, is correct. Just because a family name sounds like that of someone famous does not mean you are from the same family.

Here’s a series of examples of errors I found almost immediately in online Trees, without even doing an in-depth search. This was for Margaret Beaufort–not Henry VII’s mother but the ‘other’ one who was the mother of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. In one Tree she is listed as having married her second husband at 19, in 1463. No mention of her first marriage or of her son Henry…who was born in 1455. Let alone her second son, Humphrey, who died young.

Next she is called ‘Countess of Darrell’ (Darrell was her second husband’s surname). The owner of the Tree gets her marriage to Humphrey Stafford right this time…but now her child is a mysterious ‘Eden Hunte.’ The write up also calls Humphrey a Yorkist, when his family were firm Lancastrians.

The next entry has no mention of Margaret’s Stafford marriage but mentions the Darrell one, and her daughter from that union, Margaret. However, it then goes on to give her a another marriage to a mysterious ‘Hand’—Henry Hand with whom she supposedly had a child called Thomas. It then gives her death date as that of the more famous Margaret Beaufort, when in fact she died long before in 1474.

Trailing down the page there were other Darrell family members with strange and improbable histories–a Margaret Darrell who, aged 8, married Richard Deering in KENTUCKY IN 1554? Considering the first English settlement in the USA wasn’t till 1607 this seems very unlikely indeed!

Looking up my own RECENT ancestors, I have even found errors there. One source had my maternal grandad married twice–nope, just once. Another had my great-great grandmother giving birth in her 60’s; they had confused her with her daughter, who had the same first name and had predeceased her mother!

Here’s a good article on the veracity of online family trees

(Certain historians I shall not name have been known to use online trees and come up with howlers such as ‘Joan of York‘ and illegitimate kids of which there were no proof.)

Of course, pretty much every one of us with long-term British ancestry will almost certainly have a connection somewhere to royalty and nobility. That makes sense because there were only between 3-4 million people in Britain in the 15th century, so all the millions of descendants around the world today must of necessity descend from that small group, hence all family lines crossing multiple times. So, yes, folks, you probably are related…but so is everyone else!

Above–Edward IV‘s geneaology tree